Poor Silas, I thought. This was so hard for him.
Not as hard as for ME. But still.
He’s really such a baby.
He dried his eyes. “Ugh. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t worry, I’m the World Not-Talking Champion.”
That was when Jasper peed on my sneaker.
“Jasper! Bad!” Silas shouted. “Sorry, Norah. He’s mad that my grandparents are on vacation.”
I shook my foot. “Maybe he needs to go out.”
Silas groaned. “He always needs to go out.”
“Do you walk him?”
“I guess. Some.”
“Let’s go walk him together.”
“Now?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Silas and Jasper followed me out of the house. We went over to Dad, who rolled down his window.
“Hey there, Silas,” he said. “Long time, no see.”
“Dad,” I said, meeting his eyes. “Silas and I are going to take his grandparents’ dog for a walk. I know you want me to go home and rest, but this is very, very important. I could have just snuck out the back door, but I promised not to freak you out again by disappearing, so I’m telling you exactly where I’m going. I’ll be home in an hour. Okay?”
I held my breath, ready for an argument. But I think Dad saw something in our faces, or heard something in my voice.
Also, at that moment, Jasper put his front paws on Dad’s window, and drooled.
“Okay,” Dad said, waved at us, and backed out of the driveway.
POMEGRANATE
When I got home exactly one hour later, the house smelled like hot fruit. Maybe Nicole was baking a pie, I thought, my mouth watering as I entered the kitchen.
“Hey, girl.” Nicole barely looked up at me as she whisked something in a small saucepan.
“Hi,” I said, poking my nose into a saucepan, where red juice was bubbling. “What are you making?”
“Pomegranate Chicken. An ancient Persian dish, extremely yummy.”
I stared at her. “Pomegranate?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t tell me you’ve never had pomegranate seeds.” She held up a bowl of tiny red seeds, small glistening rubies that looked almost poisonous.
“No,” I replied. Because I thought it was the food of the dead! Not an actual, literal thing to eat, just something in a myth, like ambrosia or manna. But with bad associations, especially for Persephone. “I think I once had a pomegranate-flavored lollipop or something. But I never ate the real fruit. How does it taste?”
“Delicious! But hands off those seeds; I need them for my recipe.” Nicole seemed jumpy as she shooed me out of the kitchen. Was she nervous about cooking for Mom? Why would she be? She wasn’t planning to poison her, was she?
Norah, this isn’t a myth; stop it, I scolded myself. Mom and Nicole are getting along just fine!
Nicole poked my arm. “All right, I’m busy, so don’t distract me now, please. Go wash up and set the table, okay?”
“Sure.”
While I was upstairs in the bathroom, the doorbell rang. I could hear Mom’s voice as she came in, and then a happy cheer from Dad, followed by a loud cheer from Nicole. All the cheering made it sound as if Mom got the job. I did a little dance with elbows.
But here’s the strange part: Instead of going straight into the living room to give Mom a hug, I snuck into the kitchen. I absolutely had to taste those pomegranate seeds, even though Nicole needed them for her recipe.
Because the more I thought about the Persephone myth—and I’d thought about it the whole walk home from Silas’s—the more I was convinced that the pomegranate was the key. D’Aulaires’ said Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds while “lost in thought.” Stress eating, Harper had called it.
But that didn’t make any sense. Persephone wasn’t a zombie—she’d know when she was eating something, especially after going so long without food. And if the fruit was so delicious, she’d taste it, right? Ayesha once told me about this other version, where Hades tricks Persephone into eating the pomegranate seeds, but that wasn’t any more believable. I mean, if she was already eating other stuff, maybe he could sneak a few seeds into the recipe—but she wasn’t eating anything, period. So how could she not realize she was eating the pomegranate?
While the red liquid simmered in the saucepan, the unused pomegranate seeds were still on the counter in a small bowl. I grabbed a handful of juicy seeds and stuffed them into my mouth, half expecting the kitchen floor to open, and me to get sucked into the crevice.
Nothing happened.
The seeds were delicious, tart, a little like raspberry—but more like the lollipop version of raspberry than the actual fruit. And there was another flavor, a deeper one, in the background. What was it? I couldn’t figure it out, so I grabbed another handful.
“Norah?” Suddenly Nicole was behind me.
I spun around, flailing my arm, which crashed into the saucepan handle, sending the whole thing to the floor. Splat.
“Oh, no! Oh, Nicole, I’m so sorry!” Frantically, I grabbed some paper towels and tried to sop up the red juice. “Maybe if we squeeze it out—”
Nicole crouched beside me with a sponge. “No. It’s just gone. That’s okay.”
“But it’s not! I feel terrible! You were making something special for us, for Mom, and you told me not to eat your pomegranate, so I had no business—”
Nicole put her hand on my arm and smiled, showing the gap between her front teeth. “You wanted a taste. It’s not a crime; don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s just food, silly.”
* * *
We had a great dinner anyway. Nicole used the few extra pomegranate seeds left in the bowl, combined them with apples, oranges, and lemons she found in the bin of our refrigerator, and invented a fruity sauce for the chicken. Even Mom had to admit it was delicious; she didn’t snark once about Nicole being a “foodie.”
The whole time, we talked about Mom’s new job. It would start in the spring, she said, and it was “probationary,” which meant that basically it was a tryout. (“But what job isn’t?”
